Bidding for the environment

Economists regularly argue that the best way to tackle climate change is to put a price tag on the environment. As it happens, in recent weeks a bidding war has broken out over the issue - not in dollars or carbon trading futures but between Britain's major political parties. In contrast to political debates on migration, for example, this bidding war is a virtuous one, a race to the top rather than the bottom, as the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour seek to burnish their eco-credentials. The fruits could be seen on the front page of this newspaper yesterday, in the government's plans for a climate change bill that will set out long-term targets for cutting Britain's carbon emissions, perhaps as early as the Queen's speech to parliament next month.

The change in the political climate has been as eye-opening as the environmental damage being revealed by scientists. After some initially glacial progress, parties are now moving quickly. For Labour the abrupt policy shift dates from Tony Blair's decision to add climate change to the combined G8 and EU agendas of last year. For his part, David Cameron has transformed a party whose previous environmental policies had been marked by scepticism and bandwagon-jumping on the road fuel tax protests of 2000 (all the more shameless since the protests were aimed at the fuel escalator first introduced by a Conservative government as a sensible environmental measure). Yet so far the debate has, to paraphrase, been tough on carbon but not on the causes of carbon. Will the government's new climate change bill contain significant measures? Time is short and ministers are still working on the detail - Tony Blair yesterday would not even confirm that the bill will appear in the Queen's speech. But the fact that David Miliband, the environment secretary, is able to hurry such a bill into place at this late stage says a lot about the serious political positioning going on.

More important, at this stage, than the detail of the bill is the framework it erects, specifically the horizon it uses for cutting emissions. Groups such as the Friends of the Earth favour year-on-year cuts, arguing that annual targets maintain focus and responsibility. But the new bill is said to offer a series of 10-year targets - the danger being that governments will punt the hard decisions it involves too far into the future, cramming cuts into the last year or two of a decade. Ministers say they are concerned with cumulative emissions as much as final targets - and so they should be. Whatever the timeline, a climate change bill that fails to include a sophisticated mechanism to lower the trajectory of emissions as well as set targets would be foolish - and a gift to an opposition which claims the government is over-cautious.

The other environmental bidding war going on at the moment is a Dutch auction in which geologically suitable local authorities vie to become home to Britain's pile of highly toxic radioactive waste. The government has wisely - given the lack of alternatives - adopted a recommendation of the independent Committee on Radioactive Waste Management that "host communities" be invited to apply, in return for a reward in the form of social and infrastructure investment. Hopefully the incentives will be more nuanced than "Bury 470,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste, win a swimming pool!" or similar, and the £10bn price tag suggests it will be. Community involvement and consent is the best way of slicing the incorrigible knot of likely objections, with some communities already indicating interest. But two things must also be made clear. The first is that the geological practicality of any decision must be paramount, rather than cost or local enthusiasm. The second is that the host communities must be told clearly what is being disposed of - and must be allowed to opt out at any stage if later decisions change the type or quantity of waste being buried beneath their land.